The Celebrity (34 page)

Thorn glanced at his watch once more, slapped the portfolio closed with a triumphant thud, and made for the door. Diana tried to stop him; Jim Hathaway was on the line. “I’m late now, tell him. I’ll call him the second I get back.”

Jim Hathaway. Hathaway-Johns, Inc. The Dilemma, Inc. It was unreasonable of the dilemma to insist on being solved now, when the Hathaway-Johns Agency was not an immediate possibility, but insist it did.

No longer could a man of honor, Thornton Johns reflected, as he seated himself in the detested subway—no longer could an honorable man permit his friend and onetime mentor to go on planning a partnership from which the honorable man might, at the last minute, wish to withdraw.

Yet no sensible man could wish to withdraw prematurely and without sufficient cause from something he had so desperately desired. The sufficient cause was missing; there was no true cause at all.

After the Waldorf and White Plains and Roslyn, the time had finally come to tell Hathaway about next spring’s lecture tour. Jim had been thoroughly reasonable.

“Of course you should go ahead, Thorn. You’ll be making new contacts all over the country, getting all that wonderful publicity, and we would open our doors on the crest of it when you got back.”

“But how about other tours, after we’re running? I can’t make use of Zoring Smith for a season, and then drop him cold because I’m too busy to leave New York. It’s a sizable investment, you know, building up a new lecturer. I’ve got to play square with him.”

“Playing square is my one cardinal principle, Thorn. I’d never want you to let him down.”

“But I’d be letting you down, the first couple of years, if I went off for three months at a clip and left you holding the bag.”

They had discussed it repeatedly; the last time Jim had altered the profit-sharing ratio by five per cent in Thorn’s favor. “It isn’t the money, Thorn, it never was with you. The first time I saw you I knew you were wasting yourself, peddling insurance, and by now you’ve proved it a thousand times over.”

Jim must have felt the success of that. He kept harping on a man’s natural instinct to raise his status in life. He referred frequently to the heads of large literary agencies like Curtis Brown, Ltd., and Brandt and Brandt. They were professional people, not businessmen. Jim always made “businessmen” sound very sharp and clipped; his enunciation softened over “professional men.”

It was potent arguing. Thorn reacted to it each time. Just the same, something which had once been clear-cut and clean-edged had fuzzied over with doubt.

If it pends, Thorn thought, it peters. Something’s gone flat, that’s all. Would it be doing Jim dirt to back out? It would not. Jim would team up with somebody else and go right ahead anyway. I would be his client on Gregory’s law and tax work, and we would remain the best of friends.

When had the dilemma begun? It was as hard to pin it to a date as to pin it to a cause. It wasn’t the extra money he had been making on Gregory’s work and on lecturing; it wasn’t the upsurge in his insurance income. His coup with Jill meant over five thousand dollars this year, but the cost of living for well-known people was staggering in New York and he actually was running behind more than ever.

The subway stopped at Grand Central and Thorn changed to a local. At Fifty-First Street, he took the steps two at a time and blinked as he reached the street. It had turned into a beautiful morning, sunny and crisp, and it was even nicer now that he was uptown. What was Digby so impatient about; urging him to break everything and get up there without delay? Luther no longer asked hopefully about whether Gregory might not find it more businesslike to change to a professional agent. At Digby and Brown, partnership with Jim would get him nothing new. That much was sure.

The dilemma, the dilemma. No matter where he started, he was back at the dilemma. What had changed? Why had the vision of himself as Jim’s partner lost its terrific appeal?

Thorn suddenly stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Would
Variety
have run special human-interest stories if Curtis Brown sold a property to the movies? Would two New York papers show half-page pictures of Brandt and Brandt seeing Jill Goodwyn off at La Guardia?

How blind could you
be?
It was the old man-bites-dog difference, and until this instant he hadn’t seen it. All the .appeal in Jim’s proposition—the impressive uptown offices, the professional status, the widening contacts with Maude Denkin and Nell Abbott and the rest of Jim’s clients—all of it paled before this sudden sun of recognition.

Why, at his lectures they always lapped it up when he said meekly, “I’m just an insurance salesman; World War II started me on my hobby of keeping my brother’s royalties straight.” Would they lap it up if he said, “I’m a literary agent and my brother is my client?”

All at once, Thornton Johns was on air. Insurance-salesman-with-a-hobby was a combination that had won everything in sight for ten months; insurance-salesman-with-a-hobby would go right on doing so for ten years.

Traffic streamed by him, ribbons of color in flashing horizontals, and he glanced about him in delight. Across Park Avenue a crane was swinging a beam aloft nearly twenty stories. He stood watching until it was level with the top floor of the giant steel skeleton; his spirits soared with it. Jim had talked of finding space for them in one of the good office buildings going up around here; a large sign proclaimed May, 1950 as the completion date on this one. It would be a smart address, all right, and a handsome place to work—practically all glass, like most of the new skyscrapers.

A faint regret pinched Thornton Johns’ heart.

Another beam began its ascent into the air, and he realized how earth-bound such regret could be. If he wanted a Park Avenue address, he could have a Park. Avenue address without the Hathaway-Johns Agency. He could move his own office; he could be an insurance-salesman-with-a-hobby on Park Avenue as well as anywhere else. The hell with the extra expense; the hell with holding back from anything he wanted.

Behind him and to the north, a sundering of metal and stone tore through the noise of traffic, and Thorn looked around apprehensively. A wrecking gang was pulling down four old brownstones in a row. More new construction! Two great new buildings almost facing each other.

Both sides of the avenue, Thornton Johns thought happily, as he began again to stride on toward Digby and Brown. Both sides of the street. The literary side
and
the insurance side. He hadn’t needed Jim Hathaway to meet Jill Goodwyn, and as for Maude Denkin and Nell Abbott and the rest of Jim’s big authors and playwrights, he had met
them
already. He could phone any one of them on his own, take them out, get to know them and their problems; he had only been holding back as a matter of discretion and timing. Adding another insurance policy didn’t mean breaking off written contracts or moral commitments, the way leaving an agency did; people, placed policies with different brokers all the time.

Both sides of the street. It was like the title of a song.

Whistling, Thorn entered the Digby and Brown building. Upstairs he paused at Janet’s sliding window. “Why, Jan,” he said, “you look like spring.”

She turned square around in her chair, the board ignored. “I feel like spring. You like?”

She was wearing a yellow dress and green earrings. “I’m crazy for it,” he said.

“Here’s what
I’m
crazy for.”

She held up her left hand. On the fourth finger was a ring; from the way she flaunted it, the tiny stone might have been four blue-white carats.

“That damn boyfriend!” Thorn groaned.

“Dick? I gave him the cut-off for good when I got back from my vacation.
This
”—she flashed the ring once more—“is from a fellow is Mr. Muncy’s assistant at Brentano’s.”

“Tell him he’s got the top of the list,” Thorn said and went on down the hall.

Luther Digby looked relieved when he saw him. “At last,” he said and stood up. “I thought maybe you’d misunderstood about it being today.”

“Hi, Luther. I was held up.” Digby was still standing, but Thorn sat down. “What’s eating
you?
”

“I’ve got an idea, Thorn, a big idea. I’ve talked it out with Jack McIntyre and
he
thinks it’s a great idea, if we can manage it. I want you to promise you’ll keep it in strictest confidence, whether you say yes or no. Alan Brown and Barnard haven’t an inkling of it.”

Thorn studied him. Digby was excited. His face was repulsive again; the eyes bugging, the florid skin turning to scarlet. Obviously the answer would be no. Better yet: Well, I’ll turn it over in my mind a bit, talk it out with Gregory, and let you know tomorrow.

“I promise.”

“Not even to Gregory?”

“What?”

“You won’t even talk about it to Gregory?”

“Now look here, Luther,” Thorn said with dignity. “I represent Gregory. Everything I do is for Gregory. Anything whatever that concerns his books or his contracts or his future work—”

“This is about you.”

“Me?” Digby was puffing up like a pigeon; having preened himself in public for ten months on
The Good World,
he couldn’t stop. At Thorn’s lecture in Stamford last week, Digby had got himself introduced to everybody; his voice was all over the place. The publisher of
The Good World,
the discoverer of Gregory Johns; Mr. Johns’ publisher, for twenty years an unwavering’ confidence—

“What do you mean, ‘about me’?” Thorn said.

“That lecture of yours,” Luther said, “bowled me clean over.”

Thorn smiled. The old butter-up process while the knife was being honed. “Thanks.”

“You could expand it,” Digby went on, “into a book.”

“I could
what
?”

“McIntyre heard you at the Waldorf and now I’ve heard you too. We compared notes. My God, Thorn, you’ve got enough material for two books. You would, anyway, if you put in everything about your own childhood too, and how you grew up, and the insurance business, and how you first decided to take on Gregory’s work. And the two movie sales and, ah, your good friends in Hollywood.”

Thornton Johns stared across the desk at a vision. The sincerity in the man’s eyes! The urgency in his voice! Luther might be an ass at times, and a knave—it certainly was knavish for a man to grow famous on another man’s talent, though Digby could never see that. But when it came to handling a runaway, he was a master. Thorn remembered publication day. “Me write a book? I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

“A tape recorder,” Digby said “or a stenotype machine. We’d pay for it, arrange it, have an operator there taking down every word, at four or five lectures. After that it would be an editing job, a patching job; writing in transitions. It would be a natural, I tell you, a sensation.”

Thorn thought of the white cards and the fountain pen. Wherever he lectured now, the ladies implored him for autographs. He wasn’t as old-fashioned mulish as Gregory, but he hated the white cards. Filing clerks’ cards—that’s just what they looked like. Probably that was just what they were. To autograph a real book, your own book—Thornton Johns quickly lowered his lids against Digby’s scrutiny.

“We’d like you to rush it,” Digby went on. “In this bad slump, nonfiction’s the only thing selling—apart from one or two novels a year. We have nothing big on the list for 1950, and with that title—”

“What title?”

“Why, the same as on your lecture.”

As if he were in his own office, Thorn rose and began to pace the room. Behind him Luther Digby sat motionless, watching the swing of his long legs, noting the tight muscles around his mouth. If this wasn’t constructive, creative editorial thinking, what was? Ed Barnard hadn’t the only editorial mind in the place, as Ed Barnard; seemed to think. Barnard was always saying an editor shouldn’t parcel out ideas; that an editor should only discuss, talk, encourage, listen, and then edit.

If people like Barnard headed publishing houses, there’d be no money for editors’ salaries. Barnard was forever citing Max Perkins as his ideal; yesterday Barnard came back from lunch and went around telling the whole office that Scribner was preparing a collection of the Perkins letters to Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe and everybody else. Well, Barnard and Max Perkins and all the other great editors could have their theories and try to sign checks with them.

Thornton Johns halted before his desk, and Digby had to tilt his head back to meet his glance. “If I did say yes, Luther, how much of an advance would you give me?”

“Advance? I hadn’t even thought of an advance.”

“I have. A thousand ought to be a safe bet on a thing like this.”

“A thousand! Good God, we never gave
Gregory
a thousand.”

“You never had
The Good World
before either.”

Now it was Luther Digby who paced the room. And for one moment, after Thorn finally had left, just before Mr. Digby’s rage died away, he wished wanly that he had never had this burst of editorial creativeness. One thousand dollars! A straight fifteen per cent from the first copy. No extra rights. Maybe Barnard was right.

Luther Digby sank back into his chair and sat quite still. Minute passed after minute, and he did not move. Nowadays Thornton Johns always treated him like a subordinate. Up at Vermont, those authors had flocked around, asking a thousand questions about
The Good World
and about methods of leading publishing houses like Digby and Brown; he was invited back for next summer, and he probably would go out to Montana for the Western Writers’ Conference right afterwards. At the seminar in Columbia’s School of Journalism a couple of weeks ago, they had kept him sitting there for three full hours. He might write to old Johnny Backing at Yale and tell him about it; Johnny gave the same sort of course.

And that gorgeous blonde, Evelyn Larkin, who seemed to prefer literary men and who had dined with him twice, had opened her blue eyes wide and said, “Why, Mr. Digby, you’re becoming a regular Dean of American Letters.”

Subordinate indeed. For a moment he hated Thornton Johns and Gregory Johns as well. A piercing clarity came to Luther Digby and he realized he never
had
liked authors. Authors piously prattled about self-expression; how many of them would write books if their names were left off? Hypocrites! A ravenous greed for fame drove them; every last one was a celebrity hound, and a doting public threw them great juicy hunks of it while publishers and editors starved for any recognition at all. Scribner might do well enough with the Perkins book next spring, but that would only prove the rule.